Focus on the Questions not the Answers

I was thinking about the pressure on leaders to know. Everything. This despite the fact that when doing truly adaptive work and leading in complexity, leaders can’t possibly know everything. So it seems obvious from a distance that the real money is on resisting the pressure to always provide neat answers and, instead to sit with the questions a little longer. And then a colleague offered a piece of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke to participants in a leadership program as a provocation and it summed up my thoughts more eloquently than anything I could write. So here it is.